Drop of 11 places - server issues?
-
Hi all,
I have experienced a drop of 11 places for our main keyword since our last Moz rankings report which means page 2 to page 3.
I have also received an error 904 in my weekly crawl report two weeks in a row and think this may be the reason for the drop. Could this result in a drop of 11 places?
Last week I also tweeked the H1 tags on my main landing pages, nothing major just a reordering of the words. Could this result in such a major drop?
Final question is does anyone know of any major algorithm update last week that could have affected rankings so drastically?
Thanks all
Gavin -
I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.
-
A 904 error is a timeout. As such this could be on either end of the crawl or in the middle. If you have You should have remote monitoring to measure server uptime and performance. Check the time of the 904 errors with your monitoring. Also review server logs for that period for other errors.
In some cases we have seen security systems block crawlers - especially at larger companies where web app firewalls are in use. The result can be that the system thinks there's an attack and could tarpit the crawler.
This is just speculation but something to easily rule out by looking at your server's logs and monitoring for the period in question.
-
Hi bjs2010
If it was just the 904 error alone I wouldn't be too interested. However it came at the same time as a rankings drop. This also was the second week in a row that I had received the Crawl error 904.
Would be good to know if others got the crawl error notification though? Is there any way to know when SEO.Moz do their crawl as it could be when our server is running some back ups.
Thanks
Gavin -
We got that 904 error also in last weeks crawl. Never ever had it before and we have great hosting. I´m not sure if this could be a Moz issue as opposed to a server issue. Any others experience a 904?
-
If only! We host the website internally and the IT dept who look after the server say there are no issues with the server or network configuration.
The 904 error is on both our sites which are both located on the same server.
The best solution would be to outsource the hosting.
Cheers
Gavin -
Would it be possible for you to change hosts?
-
Thanks Martijn
The drop in rankings is quite significant and comes at the same time as the crawl errors in my reports.
I have 2 websites on the same server and both weekly reports show '904 Response from Server Timed out Without Completing Page Request' and both sites have shown a drop in rankings.
Thanks for your response.
Gavin
-
Hi Gavin,
Most of the updates from the last time that were noteworthy weren't launched last week. Server issues could be an issue that have let your page drop like this, Google could see that your site wasn't stable and have 'decided' that they will put you down for a while to make sure that visitors won't have any issues with your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Major Drop in Traffic Outside AU After Migration
We have a major drop in traffic after migration especially in the US and other international countries but we are more worried about the US. Before Migration:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | christwix
February 3 - March 18, 2018 (44 days)
vs
After Migration:
March 20 - May 2, 2018 (44 days) See GA traffic comparison (screenshot 1) Also, based on SEMrush the traffic, the United States is down by 46% (see screenshot 2) while Australia has decreased by 12% (screenshot 3). What could be the main issue issue of this? Would really love to hear an in-depth explanation about this. Keen to hear your thoughts about this. Cheers, iNMdNNq OTq5wYn gCBmFOF0 -
Sudden inexplicable drop in important keywords
I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report. One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause. Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean. I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that. We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week. I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong! I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up. I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs. I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday. I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year. I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated? Thanks Catherine - very stressed Mozer 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Selectaglaze1 -
Google Mobile algo traffic issue?
Hello, I have just been approach by a website owner - site isn't mobile friendly in any way - and they've seen a significant fall off in traffic since 23 Jan... backlink profile is clean (and no linkbuilding undertaken) - nothing else has changed... - more than half their traffic is via mobile devices and they've lost a good 1/3 of their traffic - and drilling deeper it's their organic traffic that's been hit. Anybody else seeing similar? edit... for reference: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-released-mobile-algorithm-think.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
90% Traffic Drop...
Hey Moz Community Our team has been racking our collective brains about a 90% drop in traffic a niche client of ours has seen. The traffic drop occurred September 20th. The site averages 300-400 unique visits a month (very targeted & niche) & dropped to 30-40 uvm. The domain is on an exact match but other then that I can't see anything that would be deserving of such a significant drop in traffic. Our campaign had been performing very well & we were seeing steady gains in traffic & ranking over the long term until September 20th. I'm curious if the exact match update would have such a big impact months after it was released (July/July if I remember correctly). I also didn't think it could be such a big issue because that domain has been used by us for a couple years. Is the Exact Domain Match such a big deal? eJGe3Vw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hendersondavidp0 -
International SEO and Server Hosting
I am quite new to international SEO. I have a customer who wants to use the same website content on various domains targeting different countries. Such as; xxxx.hk - same content targeting Hong Kong xxxx.co.uk - same content targeting UK xxxx.de - same content targeting Germany I found that it could be possible with the Google suggested hreflang without any duplicate content problem. Is that true? Could someone explain this for me. Another question; if above is true do we need to make other adjustments as well. Such as; Any adjustments in Google Webmaster Tools (for each domain) Server location, does that really make a difference? Can we host each of the domains on the same server or should we seperate them and host each one on the country it is targeting ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stradiji0 -
What to do after a sudden drop in traffic on May 8?
Hello, I own Foodio54.com, which provides restaurant recommendations (mostly for the US). I apologize in advance for the lengthy questions below, but we're not sure what else to do. On May 8 we first noticed a dip in Google results, however the full impact of this sudden change was masked by an increase in Mother's Day traffic and is only today fully apparent. It seems as though we've lost between 30% and 50% of our traffic. We have received no notices in Google Webmaster Tools of any unnatural links, nor do we engage in link buying or anything else that's shady, and have no reason to believe this is a manual action. I have several theories and I was hoping to get feedback on them or anything else that anyone thinks could be helpful. 1. We have a lot of pictures of restaurants and each picture has its own page and these pages aside from the image are very similar. I decided to put a noindex,follow on the picture pages (just last night) especially considering Google's recent changes to image search that send less traffic anyways. Is there any way to remove these faster? There's about 3.5 million of them. I was going to exclude them in robots.txt, but that won't help the ones that are already indexed. Example Photo Page: http://foodio54.com/photos/trulucks-austin-2143458 2. We recently (within the last 2 months) got menu data from SinglePlatform, which also provides menus to UrbanSpoon and Yelp and many others, we were worried that adding a page just for menus that was identical to what is on Urbanspoon et all would just be duplicate content so we added these inline with our listing pages. We've added menus on about 200k listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeVH
A. Is Google considering this entire listing page duplicate content because the menu is identical to everyone else?
B. If it is, should we move the menus to their own pages and just exclude them with robots.txt? We have an idea on how to make these menus unique for us, but it's going to be a while before we can create enough content to make that worthwhile. Example Listing with Menu: http://foodio54.com/restaurant/Austin-TX/d66e1/Trulucks 3. Anything else? Thank you in advance. Any insight anyone in the community has would be greatly appreciated. --Mike Van Heyde0 -
Google Business Places SEO Question
Hi All, I have set up different Google Business Places listings for each of my locations for my business. I want each location to rank for their retrospective keywords. So from an SEO point of view to help these rank.. When choosing Keywords/Categories for my listing , should I use my main keyword + my location example - I have a carpet cleaner hire depot in London and I want to rank for London so should my keyword be just carpet cleaner hire or Carpet Cleaner Hire London. My other depot is say in the location of Watford so should that listing have keywords that contain Watford in them ?. Also - Should the description contain my localised keywords ? I have looked around and cant' find much on this topic Any pointers would be greatly appreciated thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Google Places & Multiple Listings
Our client used to have a listing in each city, but after updating the addresses they were forever under review. Google said that businesses serving customers at their locations can only list their primary office. Back when this client had multiple city listings, all addresses but one were UPS boxes. If they are to change back to "No, all customers come to the business location," can they once again submit a listing for each city using these addresses? Yes, I realize they are UPS boxes, but they insist on being listed for each city.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse0